Which video tools can make tine dvd rips to avi or mkv?

[loninappleton]

Just today there was a comment elsewhere on a media title ripped to 938 mb from a blu ray release. They were talking about a full movie of maybe 100 mins. The comment which followed said that elsewhere this same file was available for 230mb, the quality was good and why bother getting it 4x larger?

I have seen tiny rips only rarely. DVD rips are usually huge and to be avoided. But why are the tiny ones rare? Why aren't tiny rips more common and what is the best way to do them with the usual tools?

Does it have something to do with an exotic mobile format such as Ipod that a program such as DVDFab has for mobile and which I have not used?

I have tried search here at videohelp using 'tiny dvd rip' and such but got no hits. Google same.

[Baldrick]

No exotic format. It's h264 video with very low bitrates and custom x264 presets/profiles. You can try http://sourceforge.net/projects/minicoder/ . Designed for small size anime video but might work for other sources too. Or MeGUI with some special x264 presets.

But is it worth it? The quality is far from perfect and you will probably spend more time tweaking the video settings than watching the movies....

[jman98]

If you want to be taken seriously around here, look up the definition of "Rip" in our Glossary section. Rip does not actually mean what you think it does. Yes, we know that most people use it that way, but ripping is not what you are talking about. You are talking about conversion. If you use the right term, you'll be taken more seriously.

One man's "too crappy to watch" video is another man's "could not possibly be better" video. I know a guy who used to make over the air recordings in the pre-digital TV days. He made them in VCD format and his OTA connection was pretty bad, with a lot of snow in it. He honestly believed his recordings were perfectly fine like they were, but 99% of our members would take one look and after a few seconds consider them unwatchable and stop watching them. The point is that while you may think that these conversions from BluRay to barely more than CD size are fine, I'm sure we have members who would be able to point out the flaws. Do note that the resolution is being shrunk down from the original BluRay sources to hide the fact that a lower bit rate is being used so it's not like the BluRay source is pointlessly bigger than it needs to be.

[loninappleton]

The original definition of rip is "to take" I believe without getting into to much 1960's jargon.
I learned to live with a certain amount of... how to put it politely... pedantry on videohelp.

Yes to rip in your definition simply means to take the dvd information and deposit it on a blank disk?

While convert means to (whether there's an interim file format I don't know) change the original.


Now that we've caught up on our grammar, is the minicoder mentioned above a ready to go version of Handbrake or it's equivalent? a customized version? Handbrake has a new version out (from information on the videohelp main page.) Are these settings described someplace that can do this task?

As to quality and so forth, whether audio or video, a good representation of the content on a 19in tube monitor is more than enough.

There is/was a site which specialized in _conversions_ of 500mb or less. Their content is current release movies which is not my interest. And more directly to the point, sometime back I saw a film drama from Australia fully two or more hours in one of these mini resolutions. I was greatly surprised at that time that I could not find more like it. The sound and audio were fine: I could identify Nicole Kidman as Nicole Kidman rather than Shirley Temple as an example.

[lordsmurf]

you will probably spend more time tweaking the video settings than watching the movies....

It's amazing how few people realize this.

[Hoser Rob]

you will probably spend more time tweaking the video settings than watching the movies....

It's amazing how few people realize this.

Yep ... a 700Mb feature length copy will usually need filter tweaking. I can't imagine what a 230Mb video would look like. I've seen 500Mb ones and they were pretty much unwatchable, even on a 15" screen.

Unless you want to watch it on your phone, I just can't imagine what good a file that small is.

If you really insist on making crap videos, just use a very low bit rate.

[hello_hello]

I've compressed video to small sizes on occasion just to see what the results would be. A couple of times it quite surprised me (I guess the video in question was easy to compress), but generally small sized encodes just don't look that good.

I wouldn't go by comments other people may have written regarding quality, it depends what their definition of "quality" might be and what they're comparing it to. Smaller sized encodes might achieve something like DVD(ish) quality but it's not like DVD quality is anything special, however if that's all you need...

If the site you refer to regarding 500MB or less encodes is the one I think you're referring to, and no doubt it is, personally I think most of their encodes look fairly average at best.

[fritzi93]

I've read and re-read the OP's posts and find no mention of whether or not the supposed Blu-ray "rip" was resized. Which could make quite a difference, of course.

Anyway, yeah, animation can be surprisingly "compressible". Rip your copy of WALL-E and load it up in Ripbot. At crf 20, 640 kbps AC3 and default profile/medium speed, it'll come in under 3 GB. Raise the crf setting, use a slower preset, lower bitrate audio and throw in a resize to 720p and yeah, I could see a 1 GB file being watchable.

Or do 2-pass to ~1 GB target size at the slowest speed you can bear (with resize, etc.). I can't imagine anything besides very clean animation getting anywhere close to that, though.

But 230 MB? Nah, that's gotta be terrible or resized way down to a resolution more suitable to a portable device.

[loninappleton]

This may be strange to hear but I never touch the video, tweak or do anything. You are saying this is a complicated process from the above and not just (as an example) use MakeMKV to "rip" the DVD to hard disk and then _convert_ it in Handbrake at a low bitrate.

This must be another noob question of mine that has never come up before (?)

No, I don't want to look at unwatchable content. My question was how did they do it because it is described _as_ watchable.

If, in another example I used DVDFab and adjusted that bitrate downward in their configure screen and also lowered the size of the file would there also be a setting for resolution downward-- say below 640x380 required and would all that be unwatchable?

We haven't got to the actual doing of it yet but I will have to learn new terms along the way.

Bluray and current dvds aside, I do a fair amount with older b/w movies. A recent one is in terrible shape so far as any care given to the output. I am going to try and find that Nicole Kidman film in the tiny size which was a download. True that one was unusual. But the 500mb releases described here as average would be worth the attempt for a 2 hour plus item of content. As I recall 500 mb is the usual size of a 48 min television program.

[Hoser Rob]

Described as watchable by who?

I've seen quite a few videos that had 10/10 audio and video ratings on the sites. They stunk. Totally pixelated, stuttering ... you name it. Just about every flaw I can think of, they had.

What were those people smoking?

I am quite aware that quality is subjective but not that subjective.

[loninappleton]

Found the film but I imagine that discussion of where is not allowed so I will just give a description:

It is 165 mins long. It is a dvd screener and it is made in h264 aac audio and the file size is 398. Pretty compact for 165 mins. n'cest pas? There is a slight possibility that it is a mismarked CAM but this was a feature film and, as I said. totally watchable.

If, at some point, I can get it and use GSpot or another analytical tool on it I will give an update.

[hello_hello]

The x264 encoder has lots of advanced settings you can tweak if you really know what you're doing, but generally it's better not to. x264 has it's own built in speed presets which change some of x264's "advanced" settings automatically. When using single pass quality based encoding, slower speed presets should compress the video a bit more, or give you a smaller file size. If you use 2 pass encoding while specifying a desired file size, slower presets should increase the quality. Of course the slower the preset you use, the longer it'll take to encode.

I just had a look at Handbrake (given you mentioned it) and can't find anywhere to specify an x264 speed preset when encoding. Nor how to specify an AVC Profile or Level. Maybe I'm missing the obvious, but most other encoder GUIs I've used do. Some will display x264's advanced options, and automatically change the appropriate settings according to the chosen x264 speed preset, so that way you can see what the speed presets actually do. Specifying an AVC Profile and Level should prevent the speed presets from using options which exceed whatever is allowed for that level. Playback devices often (or should) specify the level they support. High Profile, Level 4.1 is fairly "normal" these days.

I just had a quick look, and at a guess Handbrake's "Normal" preset seems to what you'd get when using x264's veryfast preset, while Handbrake's "High Profile" preset seems to be mostly what you'd get using x264's medium speed preset and default settings, with a couple of options changed to what you'd get using the x264 slow preset. The default x264 speed preset is "medium", then there's slow, slower, veryslow, and placebo.
As it was mentioned in an earlier post, I assume RipBot264 allows you to specify which x264 speed preset to use, as do both MeGUI (which I use) and ffcoder. I don't have any other encoder GUIs installed at the moment in order to check, but I'd guess Handbrake is more the exception than the rule, unless of course when it comes to HandBrake I am just missing the obvious.

[Nelson37]

Like many things in life, it's all a matter of "Compared to WHAT?". If "barely watchable" is a goal you wish to achieve, have at it. Most of us here have, at one time or another, made videos that, at the time, we thought were pretty good. Then we learned how to do it better, and realized that the first attempt sucked a whole lot more than we originally thought.

VCD was once thought to be a decent quality format. Virtually no one at all thinks that anymore.

If YOU like it, then it is fine, for YOU. If somebody else tries to tell you that buffalo crap tastes like steak, you are free to believe them but don't expect to convince too many other people. As a hint for future reference, usually the guy trying to convince you that buffalo crap is great has something he is trying to sell you, such as a large quantity of buffalo crap.

[loninappleton]

I am not familiar with all the current tools available and simply know and have used Handbrake and MakeMKV from other suggestions here.

As with my former thread on audio volume normalization what I'd like to learn is a method of work and a set of procedures to do the task. I'm still following this thread to find a beginning point. Initially, comment was that it's not worth doing because the quality is poor. Between the jargon, terms and variables I may have been putting the start point in the wrong place.

The x264 encoder may be the right place. And then is Ripbot a front end for it's use?

[hello_hello]

Initially, comment was that it's not worth doing because the quality is poor.

I don't think anyone here would argue with that.
Personally I've worked out the x264 quality setting (or CRF value) I'm happy with and pretty much encode everything the same way. The file sizes will be whatever they'll be. When encoding Bluray movies while reducing the resolution to 720p, that probably means anywhere between 2.5GB to 5GB per movie, at a rough guess. They vary a lot because each movie has a different degree of difficulty when it comes to compressing it (for a given quality).

The x264 encoder may be the right place. And then is Ripbot a front end for it's use?

Yeah, RipBot264, Handbrake, MeGUI, ffcoder etc etc.... they're all GUIs for setting up encodes using various tools and encoders. All of them will encode using the x264 encoder.

The x264 speed presets have been designed by the x264 developers to offer trade-offs between encoding speed and quality/file size, so us mere mortals don't need to go fiddling with x264's advanced settings. I figure the x264 developers probably know what they're doing and it's not likely I'll come up with anything more clever so I use the speed presets x264 provides.

Unfortunately, Handbrake doesn't seem to offer a way to specify an x264 speed preset (through it's GUI at least). Why, I have no idea. All the other programs I mentioned do. In fact I just remembered I have VidCoder installed on this PC. It's basically an alternative GUI for Handbrake. Even VidCoder has a drop down box for specifying an x264 speed preset. Unfortunately it doesn't automatically change the x264 settings under the "Advanced" tab according to the chosen preset, so you can't see what changes the different speed presets make to x264's settings, but it's better than nothing. There's still no way to specify an AVC level as far as I can tell, so I'm not sure how VidCoder/Handbrake decides which AVC level to use. A Handbrake user may be able to shed some light on that.

[loninappleton]

Elsewhere in VH Vidcoder was recommended and I tried to use it a few times. I prefer it to handbrake because it doesn't demand that I change screen resolution when loading. There seems to be a number of bugs in both since as I follow the forum, most of the problems by users will get the response that its a HB problem go ask them.

When using Vidcoder or Handbrake plain vanilla (no special settings except deault) and not knowing any better I had problems in a couple of areas both in software (image would not transfer without glitches) and hardware (my 3 core AMD was overheating significantly.) I discontinued using so as to not burn up my new cpu.

In reading about some of the prog.s mentioned in this thread, they mention and show multiple machines as taking the load. Or is the display of multiple computers referencing cpu cores?

Also no remark has been made about my example of a small file that a screener was the source. How could that source differ if at all?

[loninappleton]

Update.
My first stab at this was a simple load of Minicoder.
All I did was dragged an AVI to the program window and it fired up.
Ok that far.
When it got to audio processing an error box pops up and says I need Nero AAC.exe installed in one of the Minicoder directories. That I did but only after finding the Nero ACC codec exe at CNET.

Then Minicoder gave another error which says it has to shut down.

If there is something missing here or if there are users here who don't have the glitch please inform of it.

Here is the exact name of the Nero package:


Nero AAC Graphical User Interface (GUI)

I was wary of using the CNET installer but I did so just to get the thing going. I do not know if there are known problems with that or if there is a better and simpler download source.

[hello_hello]

If Handbrake is overheating your CPU..... well it's not supposed to overheat it exactly, but ideally you want your CPU running at 100% when converting, and the closer to 100% it runs, the hotter it'll get. If your CPU isn't overclocked then you might want to check the heatsink is mounted properly as a CPU using the supplied cooler should be able to run flat out without overheating if it's not overclocked. What sort of temperature were you getting when converting?

The forum automatically linked to a download of NeroAAC in your previous post. I assume you need to put it in the Minicoder directory.

[loninappleton]

If Handbrake is overheating your CPU..... well it's not supposed to overheat it exactly, but ideally you want your CPU running at 100% when converting, and the closer to 100% it runs, the hotter it'll get. If your CPU isn't overclocked then you might want to check the heatsink is mounted properly as a CPU using the supplied cooler should be able to run flat out without overheating if it's not overclocked. What sort of temperature were you getting when converting?


The board I'm using-- the newest one with a three core AMD is MSI and the peak temp. is listed at 95d. At about 87d I was monitoring and just shut it down. The Vidcoder group gave a tip on this in its settings-- low priority or something. I had not tried it since. No, no overclocking. I was actually looking at AMD tools to do under clocking and using Speedfan to increase rotation of the admittedly custom cpu cooler: I use large diameter but slow running Scythe Karamatsu fans to eliminate noise.



The forum automatically linked to a download of NeroAAC in your previous post. I assume you need to put it in the Minicoder directory.

Magic. Yes, I see what you mean now that I am back and had not seen or reviewed my reply. I see that it did work as a hyperlink. But I guess that message to install it separately has to pop up rather than being a part of the installed components? Minicoder discussion at Sourceforge shows three components to install but not that one. This is pretty odd but I still want to pursue the small file procedures.

Making a work folder with everything in it will be the start. I have AVI Synth current version ready to unzip which is the first of three progs. Minicoder uses.

[hello_hello]

I don't know anything about AMD CPUs these days, but are you 100% sure you installed the CPU heatsink correctly? I'd have assumed the stock AMD heatsink would keep it from overheating, even if it runs a bit on the warm side, but if you're using a third party heatsink/fan.... something doesn't seem right there.

I've got two PCs here with older Intel CPUs. The dual core has a stock Intel cooler and on a warm day it can get a little hotter than 70 degrees when running flat out, but that's about it. The quad core is slightly overclocked, but the third party cooler (which is just a basic one) keeps it around fifty degrees.

"Low priority" probably won't have any effect on CPU temperature or how hard the CPU is working. All it does is change the encoding priory over other tasks which need to use the CPU, so "low priority" might help speed up stuff you're doing while you're encoding, but the encoding process will still try to run at maximum speed otherwise.

SpeedFan can't speed fans up beyond the speed the motherboard is running them, it can only slow them down. However if the motherboard is varying the fan speed according to temperature and it's too slow, you could probably disable speed control in the BIOS so the fan spins at maximum speed all the time, then use SpeedFan to slow it down if need be.

[loninappleton]

There are settings in the command and control program supplied with the Regor processor. I fooled around a bit with it by putting all the sliders as low as they will go (normally default to "high" settings.)

The heat sink is stock. But I remove the tiny cpu fan and suspend a much larger but slower one (140 cm) on four screw stilts. The board runs in "free air" meaning no case and setup bench test style. There are sever more muscular fans I have which can be used for a specific jobs.

FIY Scythe has come out with a new gizmo shown here at Silent PC Review:

http://www.silentpcreview.com/Scythe_BigShuriken2B_Reeven_Vanxie

It's the same concept only redesigned as a for-sale product

I have yet to finish setup of Minicoder. Backup woes have stalled that a bit. I'm about to do a backup routine just now.

[hello_hello]

Your larger fan mightn't be forcing as much air through the heatsink as the original fan would. I'm guessing as I don't know exactly what it looks like and how close it's mounted to the heatsink, but I'd consider putting the original fan back on just to see if the CPU runs any cooler. Unless the air blows through the heatsink fins rather than just towards it, it probably won't cool as well.

Heatsink/fan combinations which blow the air down towards the MB tend to be less efficient as a rule than those which mount "sideways". Probably because they tend to have smaller heatsinks and a potential to circulate warm air a little more. The Cooler Master CPU coolers are really good value for money. I've got either a Hyper TX3 or a Hyper 212 in this PC (I can never remember which it is as they look very similar). I'm converting a video at the moment...... Quad core Intel, overclocked a bit, the CPU's been been running at 95% or more for nearly two hours now and it's sitting steadily on 57 degrees.
http://www.vortez.net/articles_pages/cooler_master_hyper_tx3_cpu_cooler_review,5.html

[loninappleton]

That's a good reading. I may have to go the route of swapping fans for one of much higher rpm (which I retrieved from an old IBM case given away as a good at "Freecycle." That's through Yahoo and goods are exchanged free for pickup rather than setting goods out on the curb. ) Same stilt arrangement but more power and more noise. Silent PC Review has shown numerous techniques to quiet computers.

Or, if I get this Minicoder or something going well, I have an older Sempron board in storage. With the associated gear I could set up a stand alone workstation knowing that the cpu might fail. The Sempron would defacto run slower but I don't exactly know if it would run cooler. I have more than one of those chubby high rpm fans though.

The goal right now is to get some software operational to do a few of these things I haven't attempted before. My backup is done (after a lot of program downloading for this) and I'm in the process of making a work folder for Minicoder with all of its and sundry pieces of needed code.

[loninappleton]

Also tried to install Ripbot. *This* one has issues with some font it doesn't have from Windows 7 and Vista. It asks if you want to get it. Said yes and it shut down as it promised but did not load any font from anywhere. A restart proved that there was no change.

It does however have a superior logo font. Very elegant. Must not be for XP users.

[FShahid]

MiniCoder is really outdated and developer stopped developing it. I recommend that you use MeGUI or Handbrake (or use Cyko for animated content, which is simpler GUI for HandBrake) as these are pretty much been actively developed. StaxRip is another good one closer to MeGUI, newer than MiniCoder but outdated as well.

If you have good knowledge of command prompt then I would suggest that you use x264 command line for video and FFmpeg command line for audio. If considering small sized Nero AAC audio then use FFmpeg+NeroAacEnc piped together.

There are advantages of command line encoding. Well to name a few, first of all you get full encoding speed as there is no GUIs or any other applications involved in it, as well as you have full control over command line switches you can use.

[loninappleton]

I am a noob and command line ignorant. I appreciate the update on usability/currentness if Minicoder etc. Previously in the discussion Handbrake and maybe Vidcoder was mentioned and I have actively used these two to make MKV's with MakeMKV as the tool to rip the file. ( I think that's correct to describe MakeMKV.)

This brings it down to what settings could be used to emulate the Minicoder etc process of making small files in Handbrake or Vidcoder-- Vidcoder preferred simply because I don't have to change screen resolutions. I've also been cautioned that the output could be poor but that that is subjective.

[hello_hello]

I'd also recommend MeGUI. It has a little more of a learning curve than some other software but it's very regularly updated. Like MiniCoder it requires a bunch of other tools, but the MeGUI installer installs them all for you, including AviSynth. One of the advantages of a program using separate tools is if one of them is updated, the new version can be installed without having to update the entire encoding program. In MeGUI's case all the tools it uses are also stored and updated on the "update server" which MeGUI checks each time it starts, then notifies you if a new version is available. It downloaded and installed the latest release of the x264 encoder yesterday.
MeGUI (or the tools it uses) is so regularly updated that recently someone asked in the MeGUI thread over at doom9 if development had been abandoned, as there hadn't been any new updates for a while. A "while" being the period during which the person who maintains MeGUI was on holiday.

I've got mixed feelings when it comes to Handbrake/Vidcoder. It doesn't give you the same level of "control" as MeGUI but it does seem to handle some "problem" videos quite well. Mainly variable frame rate video, but you probably won't come across too much of that.

Anyway, I assume MiniCoder isn't doing anything magic when it comes to encoding. I'm not sure what x264 encoder settings it uses but if they produce small file sizes it might be possible to see what they are. If you open one of your MiniCoder encodes with MediaInfo and switch to HTML view, if the encoder settings are written to the video stream MediaInfo will display them. You could copy them and paste them here. They'll look something like this:

Writing library : x264 core 125 r2208 d9d2288
Encoding settings : cabac=1 / ref=5 / deblock=1:-1:-1 / analyse=0x3:0x113 / me=umh / subme=8 / psy=1 / psy_rd=1.00:0.15 / mixed_ref=1 / me_range=16 / chroma_me=1 / trellis=1 / 8x8dct=1 / cqm=0 / deadzone=21,11 / fast_pskip=1 / chroma_qp_offset=-3 / threads=6 / lookahead_threads=1 / sliced_threads=0 / nr=0 / decimate=1 / interlaced=0 / bluray_compat=0 / constrained_intra=0 / bframes=3 / b_pyramid=2 / b_adapt=2 / b_bias=0 / direct=3 / weightb=1 / open_gop=0 / weightp=2 / keyint=240 / keyint_min=23 / scenecut=40 / intra_refresh=0 / rc_lookahead=50 / rc=2pass / mbtree=1 / bitrate=5097 / ratetol=1.0 / qcomp=0.60 / qpmin=0 / qpmax=69 / qpstep=4 / cplxblur=20.0 / qblur=0.5 / ip_ratio=1.40 / aq=1:1.00

[loninappleton]

We are making progress in the sifting and winnowing process. FWIW Vidcoder 1.3.3 is released as of July 27. I did the upgrade but did not see any drastic changes. I'll get and install MeGUI. The fact that it installs things (in the same manner as Linux libraries?) that it needs as a chain of commands in helpful. I'm always impressed when AutoGK does that.

[loninappleton]

Progress.

I have started down the MeGUI path and I hope I'm not re-inventing the wheel in the process.

1.) Installed MeGUI and let it go through it's update process.

2.) Started to read the Wiki per the link in the program

3.) Installed DVDDecrypter which I did not have on this machine

4.) installed Net Framework 4.


It's hard to sort out all the codec packs. Earlier I put on K-Lite Full- not mega- as I recall codec pack. MeGUI specifies some other things included CCCP. I have disk space yet. Also would like to make a work folder for MeGUI accessible from the Desktop. Or is that necessary? Will MeGUI find what it needs as the softwares install?

[loninappleton]

There are two guides that I have seen for MeGUI. One is a long thread that is stickied at MeGUI forum.

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=105920

While this thread of 101 pages may have answers, it appears to be a catch all and so is more like a needle in a haystack.


The second which seems better organized is at Afterdawn which is a very mature and trusted media site:

http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/dvd_to_avc_megui_part_1.cfm

The guide is in three parts and appears to be step by step. It's listed as from 2008 so I don't know if drastic changes have been made in the program since it is updated frequently.

Doom 9 also said MeGui is a mature program and well-maintained.

I may try to go through the Doom 9 thread but even from the early entries there are a lot of jargon terms-- some of which I used to know when trying to get the theory of handling video and filters etc with AVISynth.